The Unmaking of Maedhros
by Oblivian03
Summary: He was always burning, ever since their exile. Greater and greater, unravelling him more and more until he could bear it no longer. One shot. WARNINGS: Suicide, character death - see the rest inside!


**Disclaimer: I do not own any characters, plot or franchise of the Silmarillion or related world that the esteemed Tolkien built.**

 **!WARNINGS! ~ SUICIDE. Allusions to events experienced during Maedhros' capture by Morgoth including torture, forced torture of others and brief hints of non-con (non-explicit). Severe PTSD episodes. As also stated in the blurb bit - character death by suicide. Nothing mentioned is explicit or overly graphic, but nothing is happy either. This is not a pleasant story folks. ~ !WARNINGS!**

 **This may be a bit long for Maedhros' last moments but ah well… I hope I did the characters and situation justice (please forgive me if I did not), it is my first story in this fandom.**

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His bloody sword had been abandoned further back in favour of the jewel he now cradled, one handed as always since that fateful day on the mountainside which forever haunted his dreams. About them the very ground seemed to have torn asunder. Ripped apart by great and terrible blasts of fire that would send the Valar themselves cowering in fear. And still they ran, too disbelieving that they were not pursued, too afraid to look back and confirm this.

They had done it. The two of them. They had succeeded where the rest of their family had died trying and succumbing to failure after failure. Now the fruits of their pain and suffering and what seemed like their entire lives, the peaceful times in Valinor but a distant memory, laid in their hands. Their hands and no one else's.

And they _burned._

It was as agonising as anything else the infamous Maedhros had been through. Perhaps it was more so if he could think straight as his legs flew beneath him to escape his hand that was aflame. As it was, the Son of Fëanor had been consumed. First by the Oath. Then by the bloodshed. Now by the searing flame of Judgement. His Doom was coming to its inevitable end upon the wind, hasty in its arrival as it had been for all the Noldor who had fallen before.

Almost unawares, Maedhros faltered to a stop.

The elf looked again to his hand where the pure light shined and burned. It burned through all his defences and lies and half-hearted attempts to fool himself. It burned through the blood, the pain, the anguish that stained him and his fëa, that had stained him since Doriath and Sirion, since the death of his beloved cousin and King. Since Morgoth's cruel and seemingly unending hospitality. And even before then, since the first time the Noldor drew their swords against the innocent and drew their blood in an unprecedented crime that sent them Doom upon the lips of Mandos.

Maedhros' erratic thoughts tumbled into themselves, all blood and fire and suffering. Now there was no crime he had not committed save the one done unto him in Angband and even then could he lay the blame at what he had done there solely on those who forced him to do it? At the claws that had mercilessly gripped his own hands to force them forward with strength he could not hope to counter, but had tried, had failed to find the strength to succeed in countering? Yet, even if it still held true that of this one thing he was not accountable for, the fact still dimmed in the face of burnt havens and orders that splashed Elven blood on Elven hands.

His hand was burning. So too were the hands of his closest brother, his fellow kinslayer thrice over, where the elf had collapsed beside him. Malgor, the brother who was a poet and minstrel turned killer by his older brother's will, and perhaps his own, who had warned him so thoroughly against their latest action and had been ignored, countered, manipulated to _do_. Betrayed by Maedhros as surely as Feanor had betrayed his own brother and kin at Logras. As Maedhros too had betrayed his own kin, his dear, valiant cousin in doing nothing as the ships they had all murdered for burned.

A faint voice called from the recesses of his mind, trawling over the turmoil that had arisen there since what seemed like Maedhros' very beginning. The voice called and spoke and scolded him:

 _"What should you have done, Maitimo? What could you have done? Raised your sword against your King and father? Died standing aboard the ships in defiance?"_

 _"Father would not have burned me."_

 _"Are you certain of that?"_

But Fingon the Valiant was dead, slayed by Maedhros' own folly in trusting men who could not be trusted. The words were but an echo, a ghost.

His burning hand was real.

Maglor weeping beside him was real.

Their crimes, _his_ crimes were real. And he was burning for it.

They had sworn an Oath, but what good had it ever been? Only death and murder and monsters had sprung from it. His poor brothers twisted before his eyes as he had been twisted upon Morgoth's racks. As his father had been twisted by madness, twisted by the balrog Gothmog who took delight in twisting things made to be fair and free. As Fingon the Valiant, who had been good, who had been a hero, a much better one than him despite the Elven blood on both their hands (infinitely more on his own remaining one), had been twisted upon that thrice damned battlefield of Unnumbered Tears along with all the elves Maedhros had led to ruin before and after against Morgoth and their own kin. So much twisting, so much death and now the Silmaril burned him, condemned him. Judged him unworthy to be.

Maedhros parted his lips to utter a cry of true despair but no sound passed from them. Too great was the suffocating grip that hollowed his completely shattered heart.

No words could ever be written to describe the desolation that wracked him, no pretty, tragic song brought to life by Maglor's now irreversibly tainted hands. And what were words to him, a damned Son of Fëanor in any case? Ink turned to blood so quickly when reason was lost and he caved like a craven coward, too scared to lose his brothers to anger or violence (and oh! the irony of that for he had lost each of them in the end, all save Maglor and he would no doubt lose him too for so went their Doom), too scared of that thrice damned Oath and its end. He had been the one to consent in the end. He had been the one to blame. Him. The monster. The murderer. The slayer of kin and innocents. The leader of the despised Feanorian brood and their soldiers. The maker of nightmares and the monster from them.

His left hand burned and his right hand remained chained to Thangorodrim, forever maimed by Fingon - how just that the Valiant soul unmatched by any in the red headed elf's mind had punished him, crippled him and shown him as the monster he was before he, Maedhros himself, had ever realised the same truth! That the scars Morgoth and his servants had left upon him, marred him with, were only a mirror for his true nature to warn people away before he could ever awaken the beast. Too late he had realised the truth! Too late anyone had realised, too good was Valiant Fingon's heart, and the elves had paid for their oversight in full.

Evil should be killed and if Fingon the Valiant had done wrong in his life, it had been to fail to kill the evil that was Maedhros as he hung so deservedly upon Thangorodrim. Now it was left to the Valar to correct the Valiant's mistake.

So the eldest Son of Fëanor clutched his father's jewel all the tighter and burned.

Maedhros burned and knew. He knew his evil and he knew his anguish. He knew his torment and knew his folly. He knew his grief and knew his valor and knew the loss of that same valor he once had. There was so much blood on his left hand, spilled _by_ his left hand - his own, orcs, elves, in battles and kinslayings and, Valar forgive him for what he had been forced to do, in those foul cesspits deep in the dungeons of-

The elf nearly loosed a crazed laugh and the world, the One, as deaf to his most desperate pleas as they had turned, could hear those final frayed strings of sense began to snap.

For one insane moment, distinctive even amongst the madness that already consumed him, the red headed elf wondered if his right hand, left still chained to Thangorodrim, would be able to hold the jewel without burning. The only crime that hand had ever committed was to draw blood in the first kinslaying and surely, _surely_ it had been absolved by the torture he had endured for three decades in the thrall of the most sinister of the Valar. His very fëa had been scarred, perhaps irreversibly, refused even the scarcest opportunity to flee to the Halls of Mandos or that increasingly enticing oblivion as it had been torn and twisted and violated…

But it was his left hand that now burned and anything done by his left hand was his own doing, his own folly, his own evil (never mind the good it had also wrought, the bravery that had let it endure, the regret it carried, for if that counted for anything would not the Simirail burn less?).

"Ai!" The cry finally tore from his lips, more animal than Elven, more like a wraith than any living or dying thing.

 _There is nothing left!_ And somewhere before him he could see Maglor's face swimming through his tears, the twisted agony of his own countenance mirrored by his brother, but the agony of his heart keeping the elder sealed in his own private Angband to torture him further still. _Without the Oath there is nothing! Curufin, Caranthir, Celegorm, Amrod and Amras, and Fingon! Dear Fingon the Valiant, all gone for nothing and my brothers with him!_

Why had they suffered, the Sons of Fëanor, if not for their father's Oath? Why had they murdered, if not to return to Silmarils to their possession? Why had they died, if not to see the Oath fulfilled? But the Silmaril rejected them, rejected him and the Oath could never be fulfilled. So many dead. So many ruined. His own right hand left with pieces of his fëa upon Thangorodrim and all for nothing. Thirty years and a sea of blood for nothing.

The realisation broke Maedhros where nothing else ever truly could. Not Alqualondë. Not his father's insanity at Losgar and beyond it. Not the loss of his father in a more physical sense. Not Angband or Thangorodrim. Not the loss of his hand or the loss of that ever Valiant Fingon - though that alone had come the closest. Not the senseless slaughter that had followed. Not the loss of his brothers one by one until only he and Maglor remained. Not even that for there had always been the Oath, a meaning, a purpose to all the suffering and ill fates around him, driving him, compelling him. But now there was not even that. Not anything. Just a lie he had told himself to keep his own dying fire alight when so much was already burning around him, on him, in him-

Valar, how his hand burned and his eyes with it.

 _Nothing. There is nothing. I am nothing..._

 _The Darkness_ _laughed._

The heart of Maedhros quailed and his hand burned. His hand _burned_. Burned like it did when he had been forced into the flames, orcs behind him laughing and jeering as he burned and burned and _burned_ -

"Mmmnargh!" He had promised he wouldn't make a sound. He had promised he would not give them the satisfaction of hearing him scream. The desperate cry tore from his lips all the same. "ARGH!"

It was too much. Too much. Would this be what finally broke him? This stench of burning flesh? This pain beyond anything he had felt before? This amidst all the other tortures Morgoth and his sadistic generals had devised?

The orcs about him were laughing and jeering, another (familiar?) voice screaming and crying somewhere beside him, another poor soul tortured to nothingness for the cruel pleasure of the Dark Lord's forces. The orcs were still laughing and he could feel their claws, their rough skin on his, touching him and striking him, drawing blood and unwanted shivers, on his legs, his arms, his back, chest, neck, in his hair and on his face-

"ARGH!"

His hand was still burning in the fire, still pressed cruelly to it though the rest of him seemed unchained. A chasm of fire swam before his eyes delving deep into the heart of the earth. Its mouth was opened wide, inviting, calling him and offering a chance to escape. To escape everything: the orcs, the pain, the burning, the strange hollowness in his broken fëa of which he had forgotten the cause - perhaps there were too many causes to remember.

Somewhere someone might have called his name, through the haze of burning - his old name, or one of them, from Valinor. But that was somewhere far away. A figment of his mind. A distraught ghost. Maybe of someone he had slaughtered at Alqualondë. There were so many slack and bloody bodies in his head...

 _Why are there so many? I have only killed elves at Alqualondë. Haven't I?_

About him the Darkness laughed too, melding with the voices of the orcs as they burned him without mercy, without remorse, without a single care about right and wrong for this was their punishment of him, their pride work, their depraved joy they would not be denied-

 _No!_

If his fëa could not flee then Maedhros swore he would, straight into the Everlasting Darkness or to the judgment of Mandos. Anywhere but where Morgoth or Melkor or whatever it was He demanded to be called, that insatiable Dark Lord, still was.

So did that gaping chasm called to the elf and the burning that consumed him.

And as the wretched one stepped forward all his mind could do was panic, panic that grew with every passing moment and the fading of the desperate screams behind him. _What if I can't escape? What if He_ _won't let me? Not again. I can't do this anymore! I will_ not _suffer by His hand again! Not anymore. Enough. Enough! It has to end! It has to-_

A face flew in front of him bloodied and snarling and cursing and Elven. The first face he had killed. Now a patchwork of all the faces he had killed since then, hundreds of ears and noses and mouths and hundreds of damning, damning eyes, all fair made foul by his touch. And also before him were the faces of those he had corrupted, fair turned foul at his wretched orders. It froze him as surely Fingon the Valiant and Fingolfin and their people had been frozen on the Helcaraxë even as the Simirail burned in his hand, even as his foot hung in nothingness ready to plunge into a nothingness far more damning.

Malgor's voice had returned to the red head's ears, though his brother had never stopped wailing. It was sharp, clear, musical even in its grief and agony, and everything that Maedhros could not stand.

 _There is nothing..._

The Simirail burned in his hand but he could not longer feel its searing weight. He could no longer feel anything, only the burning pain and even that was numbing. His mind and heart and fëa were as barren as a frozen wasteland. Letters ignored and soaked in blood were drowning him. Wrongly corrupted fealty dragging him down. The Oath was a lie that had never existed. His last brother hopelessly betrayed by his own folly. Here there were no cruel chains keeping him bound to life. No valiant hero on an eagle's back to save him. Not a monster like him.

(A child's voice seemed to call to him and he drew his foot back. It called to him again, uttered the monster's name in an otherworldly sort of way. Maybe one voice, maybe two - twins perhaps. But which ones? Red or lost or captured? There were so many he had wronged…

...did he dare?)

 _There is nothing._

Just the burning pain. As in Angband and Thangorodrim, as during NÍrnaeth Arnoediad, as in the aftermath of Doriath and Sirion, as was now, pain endless and burning, not just of the body but of that ruined fëa Morgoth had left him with. Even in Logras. Even in Alqualondë, even then the pain had begun his unmaking.

(It would be a crime undoubtedly. Unspeakable even beyond the unthinkable that could send all fëa fleeing but his. Violence most abhorred beyond the abhorred violence he had done. His hand burned and for a moment, a single moment, a thought drifted through his head that perhaps, perhaps it was not them who were evil but the thing that had enchanted so many, that had taken even Beren's hand in its freedom to pass from one place to another, one fate to another over and over bringing its burning curse to every would-be-corpse it met. Left free would it continue to bring the same destruction? Left free would _he_?)

A constant companion. Unyielding and forever burning. All that was left now.

(Could he dare not to?)

Everything Maedhros now was.

(An unburned hand, a familiar one, missed his arm as he again stepped forward to the fiery chasm, a shout amidst the pain they were both feeling and a brother betrayed all over again even as he cried to not be left behind.)

Nothing but pain.

(Pleading. Someone was pleading and not with the burning jewels in their hands, but with him. But he burned. They both did, but he couldn't stand it. Not anymore. So he dared. He dared without thinking, dared what rarely an elf had dared, dared what no elf had succeeded in so kind were the Valar to every House but his. Or perhaps he didn't dare, just _did_. He was broken and the pain was all there was just like it was all there was before in those foul dungeons where he swore he would not-)

 _Please! Enough! Enough! I give. Just, please. Enough..._

So he jumped and fell and burned.

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 **It was harder than I thought to write him though. He did horrible things, but he's not completely bad, did some very renown good (as I understand) and has an extensive history of trauma/tragedy (which no doubt affected him) so was hard to balance - I may have been a bit to sympathetic for what his character has done... So don't know how well I did portraying his character at the end of his life. Note that the bad actions and trauma may have been exaggerated here considering it is his POV and what I believe his state of mind would have been at the end. The almost reverence (or however you want to view it) when he thinks of Fingon is again exaggerated due to this and what I think their relationship was like. Anyway, may have completely gotten his character wrong and if so I apologise…**

 **I hope that you enjoyed this. Please leave a review if you feel so inclined. I love receiving them!**


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